


Waffleosophy

by lettersfromnowhere



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Diner Waffles at 1 AM Hit Different, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:50:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26610157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lettersfromnowhere/pseuds/lettersfromnowhere
Summary: Huu's Diner has a little more in store for regulars Zuko and Katara than the "Good Cheap Roadside Eats!" it advertises. After all, when you're not-so-secretly pining for your best friend, you can use all the help you can get. And if that help comes in the form of novelty diner waffles at midnight...Well, it'll do.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 44
Kudos: 186





	Waffleosophy

**Author's Note:**

> My dear friend Dee wrote a fic which you might've read (I shall let you guess which) that we affectionately called "Waffle." I don't think it's a coincidence that this concept was born the day she finished it. 
> 
> Also, the idea of the swamp-benders owning a roadside diner makes me crack up, so I made it a thing. It's the most self-indulgent thing I've made since...well, yesterday, when I decided that I needed to write a TWG prequel about Hina's time with the Liberation League (idk man I don't need more WIPs), but still, it's a thing.

**_HUU’S DINER_ **

**_Good Cheap Roadside Eats since 1968_ **

****

**_May’s Monthly Special: Red Velvet Waffles_ **

****

**_Who says you can’t have dessert for breakfast? Not us! Our waffle of the month for May takes our signature Belgian waffle recipe and dessertifies it to perfection with Red Velvet batter! Served with a side of cream cheese frosting._ **

“That sounds _disgusting.”_

“What?” Katara feigns horror. “How could you hate red velvet?”

“It’s gross, that’s how.” Zuko slumps down in the laminate booth, red and glittery and gaudy as one might expect from the decor a cheesy roadside diner. (It’s tacky and it’s tasteless but they’ve been coming here for years, and it’s _theirs.)_ “I mean, it doesn’t even taste like food. _Nothing_ is that sweet.”

“That says a lot about your outlook on life,” Katara observes as she flicks through the menu. (Zuko knows she’s already decided on the red velvet waffles, but he also knows that she won’t put down the menu until the waiter shows up.)

Zuko closes his menu so he can watch her instead of the list of dishes floating dizzily in front of his tired eyes. “Oh?”

“Mm-hm.” If Katara knows he’s put his menu down, she doesn’t show it, and hers remains open, propped up between her lap and the lip of the table.

“You can’t just compare me to the grossest cake flavor in existence and _not_ tell me why, Katara.”

“I didn’t compare _you_ to red velvet. I compared your _mindset_ to red velvet.”

“Gee, thanks.” If it’s possible, he slumps down even further. His chin is nearly at the table’s height now, and he privately hopes she’ll look up and laugh because he _knows_ that he’s being ridiculous, but she doesn’t. “So how is my mindset like red velvet, exactly?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s _like_ red velvet.” Katara flicks to the next page of the menu. “More like…your dislike of red velvet pretty much tells me everything I need to know about you.”

  
“Unfair. _I’ve_ told you everything you need to know about me.”

Katara _finally_ looks up, and her ice-blue eyes melt to the warm, inviting blue of a cloudless summer sky. “Well, that too,” she says, ocean eyes dancing. “But…”

“Katara, come on. Now I _want_ to know.”

“How do you know that wasn’t the point?” she teases.

  
“Katara…”

“Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.” She clears her throat and closes her menu (finally). “Do you remember why you said red velvet was gross?”

“Because it tastes like chemicals?”

“Right. And why do you think it tastes like chemicals?”

“Because it’s too sweet,” Zuko asks, growing confused. “Katara, what exactly are you getting at here?”

“You don’t trust good things,” she said simply. “You see something that’s too sweet and you assume it can’t be real.”

He considers the idea for a moment and he’s secretly grateful when the waiter drops by to take their order – red velvet for Katara and a plain Belgian waffle, simple and unfussy, just like he likes it, for Zuko.

But she’s looking at him, expecting a reply, when the waiter walks away again.

“I guess you’re right,” he admits, because he’s thought it enough times not to be able to deny it. “Aren’t you always saying I have impostor syndrome?”

“You know I’m right,” she says sweetly. “You get an A and you start wondering if you cheated without knowing it. Mai walks up to you in the halls and kisses you out of the blue” – her face falls even though she tries not to – “and you’re shocked, even though she’d been flirting with you for months. Your friends throw you a birthday party and you’re surprised that they like you-“

“I wasn’t surprised that you _liked_ me, I was surprised that you _almost gave me a heart attack,”_ Zuko protests.

“Yeah, but the look on your face was priceless,” she laughs. Then her face falls again. “You know what I mean, Zuko.”

“Yeah,” he admits. “Yeah. I do, I guess.”

“I wish you could see that, Zuko.”

“See what?”

She doesn’t answer for a moment, as the waiter shows up and sets down their waffles – still doesn’t after she lifts her fork and knife and cuts a square of her unnaturally-red waffle, smearing it with the cream cheese icing that came in a cup on the side. Then she holds it out to him.

“That you deserve good things, Zuko,” she says, offering him a forkful of chemicals. “That you can trust them.”

“I’ll try, but I’m still not eating that.”

Katara just smirks and pushes the waffle even closer, inches from his face. He acquiesces, finally, and takes the fork.

(He tells her that it’s awful, just to keep up appearances, but it’s not half-bad, crispy on the outside and pillowy on the inside and just sweet enough.

  
He’ll never tell her but that waffle’s less like him than she wants him to think, and a lot more like her.)

* * *

**_HUU’S DINER_ **

**_Good Cheap Roadside Eats since 1968_ **

****

**_June’s Monthly Special: Chocolate Chip Waffles!_ **

****

**_Simple but classic: a Belgian waffle with semisweet chocolate chips, served with strawberries and whipped cream._ **

****

“What, you’re not going to psychoanalyze me?”

Katara looks up from from her waffle, fork frozen in midair. “Why would I?” she asks.

“I don’t know, maybe because last time you said my waffle order was a reflection of my psyche or whatever?” Zuko shrugs and then cuts into his waffle, carefully spearing a few strawberries on his fork and dipping it in the whipped cream atop the waffle, disturbing its pristine swirl. “So what’s this one mean?”

“Hm, I’ll have to think about that.” She eyes him intently, as if it’ll give her some insight she needs to answer his question. “Tell me what you think about chocolate chip waffles, then.”

“Um.” Zuko shrugs. “I just…like them. They’re good.”

“You’re going to have to give me something better to work with if you want me to psychoanalyze you.”

“Uh, okay.” He clears his throat, already regretting this whole exercise; he doesn’t want to talk about it, but now that she’s invested, he can’t stop. “They’re, uh…they’re pretty plain. But they have…extra?” he shrugs. “Sorry, I really don’t know why I like these. I just…do.”

_Simple, with a little extra._ Like them. Like _her._ It used to be easy but this _extra_ he’s beginning to suspect lingers between them…

It’s good. It’s better than easy and it’s better than simple but it’s _terrifying,_ and he’s not about to explain, confess his still-nascent feelings with an overcomplicated analogy involving diner waffles. So he leaves it at that.

“Sometimes just liking something because it is what it is can be enough,” Katara says softly, a little tiredly, as she primly pre-cuts her waffle into little segments of the two-square size she likes. Her head is down and he can’t tell what she’s thinking, if anything at all.

“Um…that didn’t make any sense,” he adds unhelpfully.

“I know it didn’t.” She lifts her face and shakes her head noncommittally. “Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

_People fall in love in mysterious ways,_ Zuko can’t help but add on in his head, but he’s not about to admit that she reminds him of the sappiest lyrics in Ed Sheeran’s discography.

(If she knew how many nights he’s spent sprawled out against his bedspread, acoustic love songs piping through his headphones as he thinks about…well, _her,_ she’d never let him hear the end of it).

“Mm,” he says instead, because Zuko is _nothing_ if not spectacularly eloquent.

“Tired?” Katara asks, using her knife to spread rapidly-melting whipped cream over a bite of her waffle.

“I’m always tired.”

“No, but, like…more tired than usual?” she asks. “You seem kind of out-of-it.”

“Out-of-it?” He looks up at her, head tilted a little in concern, and immediately regrets it because she can’t _possibly_ miss the blood that rushes to his cheeks when he sees her. “No, I’m…I’m fine. Just…thinking.”

“About?”

“I don’t know, stuff.” He’s already alarmed at how often she’s been coming to mind lately, totally unbidden, and he’s not about to admit to it. They’ve got a school year and two summers left (so much time, and yet so _little),_ and he’s not going to go and make things awkward. So it’s as good an answer as any: “nothing, uh…nothing much.”

  
“Right.” Katara stabs a bite of waffle a little too violently. “Stuff.”

He wonders at the change in her mood for a moment but he knows that if he reads too much into it, he’ll go crazy. So he doesn’t.

* * *

**_HUU’S DINER_ **

**_Good Cheap Roadside Eats since 1968_ **

****

**_July’s Monthly Special: Pecan Pie Waffles_ **

****

**_You’ll go “nuts” for these waffles! With cinnamon, candied pecans, and fresh whipped cream, you’re going to be taken back to summer nights on Grandma’s porch…_ **

****

“Too bad.” Zuko glances down at the menu and then up at Katara. “Guess we can’t try the special.”

“What do you mean?” Katara raises her eyebrows. They _always_ try the special – they’re here like clockwork around midnight on the first of every month, when Huu posts the month’s specialty waffle flavor. The one time they were late, in March of tenth grade when they’d just learned to drive, they begged him to make them the special without even knowing what it was. It’s a tradition; she can’t imagine why he’d think they needed to break it. “We can’t just… _not_ try it!”

“It’s some pecan pie flavor.” Zuko, to his credit, looks as disappointed as she feels.

“Oh.” Katara deflates. “Can’t have me in the hospital over waffles.”

“No, we can’t,” he replies, and that is when she realizes that he _remembered_ and heat blooms in her cheeks.

 _He knew,_ she thinks, heart fluttering. _He remembered that I’m allergic._

“I guess I’ll get plain,” she says, biting back her disappointment and excitement all at once. It’s such a small thing, and yet she’s sad that she can’t try the new flavor with him; but she’s excited, too, because this feels _important_ somehow, and he keeps saying “we,” and…

“Me, too.” He closes the menu and Huu, standing at the counter with a book on fly fishing in his hands because there’s no one to wait on tonight except the two of them, walks over to take their orders. “I’d feel like a jerk trying them without you.”

If Katara had to pinpoint the approximate moment she _knew_ she was a goner, that would be it.

“Zuko, you shouldn’t skip out on this because of me.” She’s blushing and her smile pulls oddly at her cheeks as she reaches across the table to squeeze his hand. “I know you love pecans. Just get them and tell me how they are.”

He looks up at her, his face constricted with terror and alight with joy all at the same time, and she can see the miniature existential crisis he undergoes as he tries to puzzle out what she should do playing out on his face. It’s adorable, how deeply he weighs all of his decisions; it’s sweet how much he cares about this one, knowing that it doesn’t matter a whit but caring anyways because it concerns _her._

_Spirits_ , Katara is a goner.

“Okay,” he finally decides. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll try it.”

  
She pats his hand. “Good boy.”

“What am I, your dog?”

“Zuko…”

He shrugs. “It’s a fair question.”

Huu clears his throat and they both flinch, sinking back into their respective sides of the booth. He simply smiles, though, as if he knows something they don’t. “Are you two ready to order?” he asks, that knowing smile not leaving his face for a moment.

“Um, yeah!” Katara says a little too brightly, suspiciously eager to recover from…whatever that was. “I’ll, uh. I’ll have the plain Belgian waffle with extra whipped cream.”

“What, no special?” Huu asks, glancing up from his order pad.

“Allergic,” she demurs, and Zuko jumps in before she has to explain anything.

“I’ll get the special,” he says, and Katara shoots him a look of silent thanks.

He’s so _good_ to her, for someone the world has been so unkind to, and though she’s a little unsure and everything feels so shaky and new, Katara wonders for a moment how it ever could’ve escaped her that, one way or another, she was always going to fall in love with him.

* * *

**_HUU’S DINER_ **

**_Good Cheap Roadside Eats since 1968_ **

****

**_August’s Monthly Special: Peaches and Cream Waffles_ **

****

**_Life’s peachy with this month’s special: a peach-infused Belgian waffle topped with cream and sliced peaches. Soak in the last days of summer while they last!_ **

****

“That description is so ominous,” Katara observes, her tone light and her face open and mirthful. “’While they last’? What exactly is Huu implying? Like…what does he think is gonna happen when summer ends?”

  
“The end of the world,” Zuko says darkly, but he can’t keep his face straight for long, and soon they’re both laughing. “Probably just the senior year existential crisis.”

“I mean, you’re always having one of those,” Katara says, swatting his arm playfully (goosebumps rise on his arm, even though the backs of her nails were the only things to hit him and he’s sort of in pain). “But…crazy, right?”

“Crazy.” They have to pause to order, but he doesn’t miss a beat when Huu walks away. “I mean…this is _it.”_

“This is it,” Katara repeated, leaning her cheek against her open palm. “Honestly, I don’t really want to think about that.”

“Then let’s not,” Zuko replies, suddenly panicked at the idea of making her worry over anything, no matter how small. “Um. So, uh…did you see that clip of that whale they saw in the harbor on the news?”

_Really, Zuko?_ He wants to slap himself for that one. Of all the topics of conversation he could’ve jumped to, why _that?_

(Well, he _knows_ why, if he’s being honest. Katara loves the ocean, and he only knew about that whale because his uncle had been watching the local news and he’d happened to glance up at that clip over his bowl of cereal and he’d thought of her because he’s been seeing the way her eyes light up when she talks about the sea life she wants to study since she was a bright-eyed freshman-

But he… _really_ can’t tell her that.)

“I did!” Katara looks grateful for the distraction, if nothing else. “Crazy, but…scary, right? I mean, they aren’t sure why it was there – I’ve been following” – ( _of course she has,_ Zuko thinks, _of course she’d care what happened to that whale, because that’s who she is. She’s a carer) –_ “but…something hd to be really wrong for it to just…swim into the harbor like that. I hope it ends up okay, ‘cause Northern Right Whales are super endangered and it would be awful if anything happened to one.” She pauses, chewing her lip as if looking for a way to lighten the mood, and Zuko almost feels bad that his anecdote has her contemplating an existential threat to the future of Northern Right Whale-kind instead of laughing. “It was a juvenile. Not a baby, but, like…a whale-teenager. Maybe just having some teen angst?”

The joke is incredibly lame, but he laughs anyway, because it’s Katara.

“Rebelling against his parents?” Zuko replies, trying for a joke of his own. “It’s not a _phase,_ mom!”

“Deep water is for _lame old people_ ,” Katara says, giggling as she tries to imitate his comically whiny teenage-boy voice.

  
Zuko’s pretty sure that he’s happier that the joke landed – that _stupid_ joke – than he’s ever been about anything, ever, in his entire sad seventeen years of life.

“We’re such dorks,” Katara giggles after a moment.

“No, _you’re_ a dork.” He grins in spite of himself. “ _I_ am _smooth._ I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“See? That right there?” Katara smirks. “Dork.”

“Only because you’re such a bad influence.”

“Ah, that I am.” Katara looks entirely too pleased with herself. “But the dorkiness? That’s all you.”

“Is _not.”_

“Where do you think I got it from, then?”

He considers for a moment, coming up short in the end. “Um…”

“Exactly.”

  
(It’s not his best quality but if he’s left a part of himself with her, he cannot honestly say that he minds.)

* * *

**_HUU’S DINER_ **

**_Good Cheap Roadside Eats since 1968_ **

****

**_September’s Monthly Special: Lemon Meringue Waffles_ **

****

**_A lemon waffle slathered in lemon curd and topped with toasted meringue and graham cracker crumbs: what more can I say? You’re going to want to save room for these._ **

****

It took an hour of scheming to get away from the homecoming dance without their friends in tow, but when Zuko and Katara duck into their booth – always the one under the window facing the freeway – they’re laughing as if they’ve gotten away with something, sitting on the same side this time instead of opposite each other. She’s still in her blue lace dress, though she’s swapped her heels for the Converse she’d brought in case they were able to slip away, and he’s still wearing two-thirds of his suit, though not the jacket.

(He can’t bear to ask for it back when it’s draped around Katara’s shoulders and she snuggles down into it indulgently. He may not have asked her to the dance but at least he managed the proper reaction when she told him she was cold.)

They’re smiling, and the adrenaline of a night spent in a dimly-lit, sweaty gym with hundreds of their peers flailing to music they both hate hasn’t worn off yet, but there’s something bittersweet behind those smiles. Katara’s all too eager to cut through it with as much sweetness as she can find, and when she takes her first bite of lemon meringue waffles, she’s found just the thing for it.

“ _So_ good,” she says through a mouthful of waffle. “You gotta try!”

“Um, we got the same flavor,” Zuko says nervously, wiping his hands on his white button-up. “But…okay.”

They’re silent as he eats, and suddenly Katara’s hyperaware of his every movement. He’s _nervous,_ she realizes – he’s fidgeting, and his expression is pinched, and when her hand brushes his under the table, it’s clammy.

In the silence, Zuko can’t help but notice that Katara seems a little sad, like there’s something she regrets about the night they’ve just had, something left undone at their final homecoming dance. She slumps, her shoulders rounding beneath his suit jacket, and he wordlessly reaches over and adjusts it so it won’t slip.

Her head snaps up at the movement, her eyes lock on his, and they freeze.

Suddenly her sadness is nervous, because she wants so badly to read further into this than his actions will allow.

Suddenly his nervousness is sad, because nothing he’s ever felt compares to this and he _should have just asked her while he had the chance_ but he didn’t.

Suddenly he realizes that his hands have lingered on her shoulders even though he’s moved the jacket into place and he should’ve pulled them away by now.

Suddenly she smells the lemon curd on his breath and thinks something rather indecent.

Suddenly he’s done hesitating.

Suddenly she’s done being reasonable.

“Do you wanna kiss me?” Katara asks, and she’s too exhilarated that she managed to ask at all that she doesn’t remember to kick herself for being so ineloquent.

“I do,” Zuko says, swallowing hard. “I really do.”

She turns in the booth, angling her body towards hers, and they meet halfway.

  
(He _does_ taste like lemon curd, and he feels like something she’s been meant to know all along. Forget the dance, _this_ is the only homecoming that matters tonight.)

“I should’ve just asked you,” they blurt out at the same time once they both pull back, heads reeling with a million emotions that are all indescribably _good,_ and they’re laughing, waffles forgotten, foreheads resting against one another.

“I thought you didn’t like me back,” Zuko admits, blushing. Katara shakes her head and kisses his cheek for his trouble.

“I thought _you_ didn’t like me back.”

“We are so _bad_ at this,” Zuko laughs, and he kisses her again because he can _do_ that now.

“The worst.”

They descend into sugar-and-adrenaline-and- _joy-_ induced giggles and soon clumsy lips find each other again.

At the deserted counter, Huu retreats into the kitchen, for they deserve privacy. But he smiles as he goes.


End file.
